Any tips on how to fill an EHDD on the Hopper 3 to maximum capacity?

[Almighty1]

I have been curious since others probably moved things from the Hopper 3 to EHDD's. What I noticed with my other EHDD's is I usually put things on a new empty EHDD when the current EHDD being used for transfers is about 95% full. Is the correct way to do this basically keep transferring until it will not allow the transfer when you select the drive to proceed and it will have a message that says the target EHDD does not have enough storage space since I believe I had seen that once until I reduced the amount of selected recordings that will be equal to less than the remaining capacity on the destination EHDD. Thanks!

 

[ppappas]

I have been curious since others probably moved things from the Hopper 3 to EHDD's. What I noticed with my other EHDD's is I usually put things on a new empty EHDD when the current EHDD being used for transfers is about 95% full. Is the correct way to do this basically keep transferring until it will not allow the transfer when you select the drive to proceed and it will have a message that says the target EHDD does not have enough storage space since I believe I had seen that once until I reduced the amount of selected recordings that will be equal to less than the remaining capacity on the destination EHDD. Thanks!

I would not wait until the EHD so full that you can't transfer any more. I used to be a software engineering manager at NetApp, an enterprise network storage vendor, and my group was specifically responsible for all the low level disk driver support in NetApp's OS. In my experience, most file systems can start to get a bit weird when a disk reaches more than 99% capacity.

 

[arlo]

Exactly. The HDD needs a bit of wiggle room in storage for housekeeping chores. You can't really consider the actual reported space as pages you can use in a notebook, a roll of film.
The controller chip will write a bit of information to the actual disk for things like where to access bits of files.
If it helps. If you removed the platter cover you would see even though you recorded a movie, etc.
It never wrote to the disk, or is read back from it. Like a phonograph record. The r/w head dances all over the place reading chunks between the multiple stacked platters.
Lookee here. It gets fun around 6:45 :


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-JJp-oLx58&ab_channel=VanSvenson

 

[charlesrshell]

Exactly. The HDD needs a bit of wiggle room in storage for housekeeping chores. You can't really consider the actual reported space as pages you can use in a notebook, a roll of film.
The controller chip will write a bit of information to the actual disk for things like where to access bits of files.
If it helps. If you removed the platter cover you would see even though you recorded a movie, etc.
It never wrote to the disk, or is read back from it. Like a phonograph record. The r/w head dances all over the place reading chunks between the multiple stacked platters.
Lookee here. It gets fun around 6:45 :


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-JJp-oLx58&ab_channel=VanSvenson

Neat video, thanks.

 

[Almighty1]

I would not wait until the EHD so full that you can't transfer any more. I used to be a software engineering manager at NetApp, an enterprise network storage vendor, and my group was specifically responsible for all the low level disk driver support in NetApp's OS. In my experience, most file systems can start to get a bit weird when a disk reaches more than 99% capacity.

Ofcouse but sometimes you aren't prepared ahead of time and you want it to use as much space, basically up to the maximum before the point where gets weird so maybe I should say let's assume 98% was the most you should put, what's the best way to get it to 98% without going over since one thing with the Hopper 3 is if you had episodes of something with the same name, you have to move everything under that name when you select as it doesn't allow you to select individual episodes. So if I was watching a show called ABC, that same show can be recorded 4-5 times a day of the same exact episode and you might say why not just keep one episode per day, the reason is sometimes, one recording may have problems while the others might not and in my case, I am watching TVB Jadeworld which means if the title is old, I can't even find it online or even for purchase but if it's recently produced, then it's not a issue.

 

[Almighty1]

Exactly. The HDD needs a bit of wiggle room in storage for housekeeping chores. You can't really consider the actual reported space as pages you can use in a notebook, a roll of film.
The controller chip will write a bit of information to the actual disk for things like where to access bits of files.
If it helps. If you removed the platter cover you would see even though you recorded a movie, etc.
It never wrote to the disk, or is read back from it. Like a phonograph record. The r/w head dances all over the place reading chunks between the multiple stacked platters.
Lookee here. It gets fun around 6:45 :


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-JJp-oLx58&ab_channel=VanSvenson

Yes, I know how HDD's work as I used to open up a few and have killed some drives when a piece of dust hit the circuit board as I have been using HDD's since MFM, RLL, ESDI, SCSI when companies like Control Data Systems/Imprimis - both which were considered the best at the time prior to Seagate buying them, Priam were still around when FidoNet and Fido Software was first available so it's similar to when a HDD is defragging, you can have bits and pieces all over the drive where it takes and migrates into each block. The video only shows how HDD's worked normally but back in 1996, when I was running the servers hosted on a dedicated connection remotely by the founders of Concentric Network Corporation known as Concentric Research Information Systems prior to that at their Beverly Hills mansion, we offended some hackers and within 2 hours, they killed the 8GB 5.25" Full Height Seagate Elite Fast Wide SCSI HDD remotely, not sure how it was done but basically when the HDD was opened up, there were scratches all over the platters when it was taken apart by one of the big well known Data Recovery Companies being Ontrac I believe, the same data recovery company claimed that they had heard someone who did something similar with a virus that made the HDD spin in the opposite direction, not sure if the last was even possible. But regardless, it was not possible to even recover data from the 8GB drive and basically they had to buy a new drive.

Phonograph records do not have heads that heads or magnetic cartridges that jumps around, as it will move from the outer big circle and after each circle is completed, it will move to the next circle and complete it and repeat until it reaches the center. So my question isn't filling it up as 100% filling up as remember there is the sector size, cluster size depending on the file system and if the cluster size was 4K and you had 9K, you will still use 12K of space for that file because 9K is basically two 4K clusters plus 1K so the 1K will occupy the entire 4K as the cluster from what I know, could be wrong can only handle 1 file. In NTFS as I learned a few weeks ago, there are plenty of files that are 0 bytes in length that uses 0 space as normally, it is supposed to take up one cluster of space but with NTFS, this happens if the file is so small that its contents and the filesystem bookkeeping fit in 1KB. To save disk space, NTFS keeps small files "resident", storing their contents right in the file record, so no cluster has to be allocated for it. Therefore, the size on disk is zero because there's nothing beyond the file record. Once the file gets sufficiently large, NTFS makes it "nonresident", allocates one or more clusters for it (creating a nonzero "size on disk"), and creates a "mapping pair" in the file record in the place of the data to point to the cluster. This is not a Windows 10 or 11 feature but a NTFS feature but only brought up originally because Windows 10 and 11 was writing thousands of 0 byte files to a folder on every system out there and people were concerned it was taking up space because lots of people are aware that a file even at 0 bytes would still take up the size of 1 cluster like it did if it was FAT16 or FAT32. So you are right that overhead matters too because just because you had 20GB left does mean you will fit even 19GB successfully as it needs to include the overhead and ofcourse it depends on what size the clusters are as it will use the full cluster regardless. I own and run a ISP but most of the boxes we have are probably not even 10% used capacity belonging to customers and for our actual servers that provides services to the customers and routing, those are all running FreeBSD with the Berkeley FFS being used, and while the HDD never reach full capacity, one thing has and that's using PINE for the email reader which can only handle up to 4GB sized mailboxes due to the 32bit addressing limitation which is not related to the OS but the email reading program so the mailboxes had to be splitted into multiple 4GB sized files instead of one for each user. The other thing is that physical HDD's also have caches which does effect speeds which is why storage manufacturers always lists two speeds, one is the speed from the cache and the other is sustained transfer rates which is the speed physically without using the cache which is usually slower than the cache speeds. So maybe my question is more along the lines of, when moving things from the Hopper 3 to an EHDD, and assuming you had more than the EHDD can hold, how do you determine when to stop moving to that EHDD so it doesn't enter the wild zone as a safety measure. Do you look at the capacity remaining in GB when you select the destination drive or is there some other way you do it? And ofcourse assuming if you were looking at the GB remaining, does that number change on a 2TB drive vs a 1TB drive, in other words, do you need to reserve twice the remaining space and not use it on the 2TB drive. So that was more of what I was trying to ask with how people determine what is considered full and not really 100% full as far as the EHDD is concerned since it's obvious you cannot fill it to 100% even if you wanted to because if you had 20GB remaining and assuming you had 10 recordings that were 3GB each, it will allow 6 because that will take 18GB but not the 7th because it can't split the 3GB into two pieces like transferring only the first 2GB and keeping the remaining 1GB for another EHDD like file splitters and archiving software could by splitting one archive into multiple pieces.

 

[arlo]

The turntable analogy was just to clarify what may have not been clear to the inexperienced every-day guy.
You're right. And you seem to know your beans. Flick the cue lever and a record plays until the stylus runs to the lead out groove.
Unless you have an ADC Accutrac.
Wow. I have to say. Your last reply was a bit like reading ancient Roman scripture. It went on and on and on.....
So anyway. I didn't get if you are using the native receiver file utilities or actually pulled the HDD and put it in a pc to do your tasks.
Because if it it is the first decision. It may be that 99.9% of people don't task a consumer receiver with what you're trying to do. The provisions just aren't in the box. And being a RTOS box. Programmers didn't have those provisions in their task list. I dunno. Oops. I did not mention that dishnet or direc boxes aren't my forte'.
Okay. So you know your beans pretty well. And actual vs usable storage space is the issue.
A RAID 1 (mirror).....which I use in my file server pc. Would like identical capacity drives. And better yet. Of the same exact type. And getting into it deeper. The exact firmware version.

Your 'same program name & recording multiple versions of it' issues. And I read previous posts with the same subject.
Could be the "smarts" in firmware and the programing in the receiver weren't in the task list at the time the coders got their assignment.
But other OS sw will see your desire to write a file name by....let's say date first, then name, then by file size.
And you don't get an alert that the same file name exists. Do you wish to overwrite it.
And when you lookup the show it says Pulp Fiction copy1. Or Pulp Fiction092020231355. Date and actual time appended.
Yeah?
My weak mind and managing freaky repairs and customer requests says do what's easiest.
Take a country town library for example. It's only so big and been there for eons. It only has so many book shelves and no more can be put in it.
Every shelf can only hold so many books. Walk to the card drawers and look for a book. You're told it's 118.121.
So you go to the 118 section and if your book isn't out on loan....117,118,119,120....121. There's your book.
So. The Smith family donates a new encyclopedia to the library. All 24 volumes of it.
They get a new card in the Dewey Decmal System rack.
But each book shelf can only hold....10 books.
The librarian slips 10 volumes in a shelf in bookshelf row 3. Enters Row 3, volumes 1-10 are "here" on the cards for them.
Has no choice unless 100's of books are moved, sequenced in the shelves and racks and the card drawers updated.
Has a bit of room in another shelf for 6 volumes further down the book rack. Location is entered on the card for each volume of the encyclopedia.
And the rest of the encyclopedia volumes have to be put in another book shelf 2 rows over. And the cards are again indexed and updated.
Hey man. It's just an analogy. Deal? And a piss poor library.
But even that requires space. In this instance on the book cards in the drawers for them.
But is kind of how a HDD works. From what I'm led to believe. Put chunks of data where it can. And update the file allocation table. It all takes room.
A DVD-RAM does kind of the same thing as opposed to a music or video cd/dvd using TOC.
A book sale could happen. Or sadly, as who we've become. Books are pulled that are history but now no longer PC.
And I don't mean personal computer.
The library now has more space for books. And a couple of volunteers come in.
Fran Scandisk, Bob Defrag, Perhaps Charlie Chkdsk.
Old card files are pulled, open shelves are cleaned, and books are moved all over the place and as Kelly Bundy said.
Vi-Ola! The encyclopedias are all together in a couple of shelves, all together. As is most of the other clutter and scattered situation that was there before. And of course. The Dewey Decimal System "book allocation table" is purged and updated.
But hey. I might be all wrong here. I just like to bs when I have time.

 

[Almighty1]

The turntable analogy was just to clarify what may have not been clear to the inexperienced every-day guy.
You're right. And you seem to know your beans. Flick the cue lever and a record plays until the stylus runs to the lead out groove.
Unless you have an ADC Accutrac.
Wow. I have to say. Your last reply was a bit like reading ancient Roman scripture. It went on and on and on.....
So anyway. I didn't get if you are using the native receiver file utilities or actually pulled the HDD and put it in a pc to do your tasks.
Because if it it is the first decision. It may be that 99.9% of people don't task a consumer receiver with what you're trying to do. The provisions just aren't in the box. And being a RTOS box. Programmers didn't have those provisions in their task list. I dunno. Oops. I did not mention that dishnet or direc boxes aren't my forte'.
Okay. So you know your beans pretty well. And actual vs usable storage space is the issue.
A RAID 1 (mirror).....which I use in my file server pc. Would like identical capacity drives. And better yet. Of the same exact type. And getting into it deeper. The exact firmware version.

Your 'same program name & recording multiple versions of it' issues. And I read previous posts with the same subject.
Could be the "smarts" in firmware and the programing in the receiver weren't in the task list at the time the coders got their assignment.
But other OS sw will see your desire to write a file name by....let's say date first, then name, then by file size.
And you don't get an alert that the same file name exists. Do you wish to overwrite it.
And when you lookup the show it says Pulp Fiction copy1. Or Pulp Fiction092020231355. Date and actual time appended.
Yeah?
My weak mind and managing freaky repairs and customer requests says do what's easiest.
Take a country town library for example. It's only so big and been there for eons. It only has so many book shelves and no more can be put in it.
Every shelf can only hold so many books. Walk to the card drawers and look for a book. You're told it's 118.121.
So you go to the 118 section and if your book isn't out on loan....117,118,119,120....121. There's your book.
So. The Smith family donates a new encyclopedia to the library. All 24 volumes of it.
They get a new card in the Dewey Decmal System rack.
But each book shelf can only hold....10 books.
The librarian slips 10 volumes in a shelf in bookshelf row 3. Enters Row 3, volumes 1-10 are "here" on the cards for them.
Has no choice unless 100's of books are moved, sequenced in the shelves and racks and the card drawers updated.
Has a bit of room in another shelf for 6 volumes further down the book rack. Location is entered on the card for each volume of the encyclopedia.
And the rest of the encyclopedia volumes have to be put in another book shelf 2 rows over. And the cards are again indexed and updated.
Hey man. It's just an analogy. Deal? And a piss poor library.
But even that requires space. In this instance on the book cards in the drawers for them.
But is kind of how a HDD works. From what I'm led to believe. Put chunks of data where it can. And update the file allocation table. It all takes room.
A DVD-RAM does kind of the same thing as opposed to a music or video cd/dvd using TOC.
A book sale could happen. Or sadly, as who we've become. Books are pulled that are history but now no longer PC.
And I don't mean personal computer.
The library now has more space for books. And a couple of volunteers come in.
Fran Scandisk, Bob Defrag, Perhaps Charlie Chkdsk.
Old card files are pulled, open shelves are cleaned, and books are moved all over the place and as Kelly Bundy said.
Vi-Ola! The encyclopedias are all together in a couple of shelves, all together. As is most of the other clutter and scattered situation that was there before. And of course. The Dewey Decimal System "book allocation table" is purged and updated.
But hey. I might be all wrong here. I just like to bs when I have time.

First of all, need to apologize as when I was responding, I have not rebooted my computer after it was seriously lagging which is not due to lack of ram being 32GB but rather on the Dell notebook, the CPU is hitting a thermal throttling due to a poor design and once it thermal throttles, windows 11 will lag until I restart the system. The other issue was my cursor on the screen while typing the message was periodically jumping to different places up and down what I was typing similar to how a defragment software shows the movement of data. And ofcourse I knew there was a issue with my T key which requires pushing many times before it will accept the input but yesterday, the clips on the bottom of the top part of the T key broke so the rubber cap in the center works but the key does not have the clips to clip to the plastic clip so not only now do I have to strike the T many times but each time it pops and lands somewhere else on the keyboard and I have to keep putting it back and repeating so was a bit on the frustrated side and didn't get anything else done except taking forever to type the message. Now I need to find a replacement keyboard just to borrow the T key except it's hard to tell which one is the Genuine Dell part and has identical keys as while it may fit, the key itself as well as the clipping piece might not be the same style, size and how it attaches might not be the same with what I have now. Changing the keyboard after looking at the manual is also hard as you basically have to take out everything including the motherboard in order to change the keyboard.

I never had a chance to get a decent turntable as the only turntable I had was the Sony that was a drawer that opened and closed with a button similar to a CD drawer. It's a joke compared to a real turntable like the Rega Planet but ofcourse the Sony was because I thought it looked awesome and it was while I was still in high school in the late 1980s.

In any case, this is not a EHDD connected to the computer but the EHDD is connected to the Hopper 3 DVR so what's used is the transferring to the EHDD from the DVR itself using whatever is built into the DVR since the DVR does some kind of encryption when transferring to the EHDD and ofcourse the EHDD I use which are the 2.5" External Western Digital 2TB drives also does 256 bit hardware encryption on their own so not sure what even happens with the data and I don't know if anyone has discovered how to playback the EHDD content on a computer either. I was asking the question because there are many on these forums who seem to have their share of multiple completely filled up EHDD's and I was more wondering how they decide on when it's considered full to them before they move everything to the next blank EHDD.

Anyways, what you mention is more when you use a device where you have control over it so it will ask you about overwriting, etc but with a DISH DVR, you can only use what is in their menus and your only choice is you select the title which will contain all the episodes for that title as it doesn't allow selecting individual episodes and then you hit transfer and select the target drive which will show the available capacity in GB but you will not know how much capacity is actually needed either because the DVR itself only shows a % of capacity used which is why it's not like a computer where you can see the capacities of both the source and destination drives among other things like cluster sizes, etc but with the DVR, it doesn't give that much information and unlike a computer, the available capacity might be inaccurate, not sure about the EHDD but the internal HD would appear that way.

 

[arlo]

First of all, need to apologize as when I was responding, I have not rebooted my computer after it was seriously lagging which is not due to lack of ram being 32GB but rather on the Dell notebook, the CPU is hitting a thermal throttling due to a poor design and once it thermal throttles, windows 11 will lag until I restart the system. The other issue was my cursor on the screen while typing the message was periodically jumping to different places up and down what I was typing similar to how a defragment software shows the movement of data. And ofcourse I knew there was a issue with my T key which requires pushing many times before it will accept the input but yesterday, the clips on the bottom of the top part of the T key broke so the rubber cap in the center works but the key does not have the clips to clip to the plastic clip so not only now do I have to strike the T many times but each time it pops and lands somewhere else on the keyboard and I have to keep putting it back and repeating so was a bit on the frustrated side and didn't get anything else done except taking forever to type the message. Now I need to find a replacement keyboard just to borrow the T key except it's hard to tell which one is the Genuine Dell part and has identical keys as while it may fit, the key itself as well as the clipping piece might not be the same style, size and how it attaches might not be the same with what I have now. Changing the keyboard after looking at the manual is also hard as you basically have to take out everything including the motherboard in order to change the keyboard.

I never had a chance to get a decent turntable as the only turntable I had was the Sony that was a drawer that opened and closed with a button similar to a CD drawer. It's a joke compared to a real turntable like the Rega Planet but ofcourse the Sony was because I thought it looked awesome and it was while I was still in high school in the late 1980s.

In any case, this is not a EHDD connected to the computer but the EHDD is connected to the Hopper 3 DVR so what's used is the transferring to the EHDD from the DVR itself using whatever is built into the DVR since the DVR does some kind of encryption when transferring to the EHDD and ofcourse the EHDD I use which are the 2.5" External Western Digital 2TB drives also does 256 bit hardware encryption on their own so not sure what even happens with the data and I don't know if anyone has discovered how to playback the EHDD content on a computer either. I was asking the question because there are many on these forums who seem to have their share of multiple completely filled up EHDD's and I was more wondering how they decide on when it's considered full to them before they move everything to the next blank EHDD.

Anyways, what you mention is more when you use a device where you have control over it so it will ask you about overwriting, etc but with a DISH DVR, you can only use what is in their menus and your only choice is you select the title which will contain all the episodes for that title as it doesn't allow selecting individual episodes and then you hit transfer and select the target drive which will show the available capacity in GB but you will not know how much capacity is actually needed either because the DVR itself only shows a % of capacity used which is why it's not like a computer where you can see the capacities of both the source and destination drives among other things like cluster sizes, etc but with the DVR, it doesn't give that much information and unlike a computer, the available capacity might be inaccurate, not sure about the EHDD but the internal HD would appear that way.

I'm sure the dishies can provide better info. but as far as I know and have seen from the many curbed dvr's I've grabbed and were given. To harvest the hdd's. None will enable you to view the content on anything but the subscriber box they were recorded with. Worse yet, if your sub runs out or you get a new receiver. You're sol.

You had to mention laptop keyboards, dang you. If you're lucky yours unclips with a few tabs and a ribbon cable and put a new one in and you're golden. Or not. Usually you see heat or sonic riveted pins that hold a keyboard to the frame. On a lucky day you get a replacement with a bag of self tapping screws and spend quite a bit of time severing the pins and running screws in. On a worse day, a hot air station and gently prying the old kb frame out. Carefully preserving the pins. And for me. A heat controlled soldering station with an old soldering tip with a drilled dimple to melt the pins down over the new keyboard assy.
Or blaze out to the office supply, wally world, and grab a wired or BT kb/mouse combo. With multi device switches. It's a whole new world using one with a Fire streamer.

For my FTA receiver I use a WD Passport 1tb drive. I'd say that if you had the option to turn on or off native encryption. Turn it off. There's already enough going on in the receiver to keep you from ever viewing recorded shows on anything else.
I'm guessing a dude in your shoes has a few options. Run a drive until you get no more storage space available and back off, swap to another one. Or invest in a hdmi splitter/capture/hdcp stripper device and intercept the stuff and sent to a NAS live. That would take a lot of time.
The % verbosity and user feedback. Guessing it is what it is. In a fill-it-up and buy more kind of a way. A stripped down flavor of Linux with no user shell available.

 

[ppappas]

I'm sure the dishies can provide better info. but as far as I know and have seen from the many curbed dvr's I've grabbed and were given. To harvest the hdd's. None will enable you to view the content on anything but the subscriber box they were recorded with. Worse yet, if your sub runs out or you get a new receiver. You're sol.

You had to mention laptop keyboards, dang you. If you're lucky yours unclips with a few tabs and a ribbon cable and put a new one in and you're golden. Or not. Usually you see heat or sonic riveted pins that hold a keyboard to the frame. On a lucky day you get a replacement with a bag of self tapping screws and spend quite a bit of time severing the pins and running screws in. On a worse day, a hot air station and gently prying the old kb frame out. Carefully preserving the pins. And for me. A heat controlled soldering station with an old soldering tip with a drilled dimple to melt the pins down over the new keyboard assy.
Or blaze out to the office supply, wally world, and grab a wired or BT kb/mouse combo. With multi device switches. It's a whole new world using one with a Fire streamer.

For my FTA receiver I use a WD Passport 1tb drive. I'd say that if you had the option to turn on or off native encryption. Turn it off. There's already enough going on in the receiver to keep you from ever viewing recorded shows on anything else.
I'm guessing a dude in your shoes has a few options. Run a drive until you get no more storage space available and back off, swap to another one. Or invest in a hdmi splitter/capture/hdcp stripper device and intercept the stuff and sent to a NAS live. That would take a lot of time.
The % verbosity and user feedback. Guessing it is what it is. In a fill-it-up and buy more kind of a way. A stripped down flavor of Linux with no user shell available.

I lived and breathed disk drives for almost 10 years at NetApp and my team did all the software support for self-encrypting drives (SEDs). I can say from all the performance testing we did, that there is no penalty for encryption. First, it's done with hardware, not software. Secondly, what limits the speed at which you can read or write data is how fast the read/write head on the end of the arm can access the required sectors on the spinning disk platters, which is always slower than the SATA interface speed including encryption if that is being done.

From what I can tell, Dish encrypts the video content before it gets written to disk and uses your account information in that encryption process. That's why if you change accounts, everything you previously recorded is lost.

 

[arlo]

I lived and breathed disk drives for almost 10 years at NetApp and my team did all the software support for self-encrypting drives (SEDs). I can say from all the performance testing we did, that there is no penalty for encryption. First, it's done with hardware, not software. Secondly, what limits the speed at which you can read or write data is how fast the read/write head on the end of the arm can access the required sectors on the spinning disk platters, which is always slower than the SATA interface speed including encryption if that is being done.

From what I can tell, Dish encrypts the video content before it gets written to disk and uses your account information in that encryption process. That's why if you change accounts, everything you previously recorded is lost.

I'd like to add a few things. Living and breathing your career is commendable. I also did the same for my previous employer. A lot of the things I did were autonomous and transparent. Probably not enough notoriety was given. But boy did they notice when I left. I heard that from quite a few coworkers later on. Guess my 'soap box' wasn't so high or eyes didn't see so well.
3 branches in 3 cities. My machines with up to 5 pc's in racks beside them were shut down cold every evening.
The other 2 cities left them on 24/7 with APC and Liebert backups. Besides the random ps failures, the other branches had "frequent" hdd failures. Not an easy task to rebuild when they did. Anyway. The CEO finally mandated nightly total shutdowns after somehow it became my task to convince everyone that a spinning motor that isn't spinning would last longer. Plus, Florida lightning storms are a bitch!
I kept a stack of cloned hdd's in my office safe. And performed network sw updates instead of dedicating a weekend of swapping cd's in machines as mandated by the USPS. When you're salaried. Extra hours suck.And my little invention of an old server with a stack of optical drives plus a bit of scripting had everyone wondering what that pile of crap was doing in my workspace.

Oh. Anyway. About the encryption. My thought was why add an extra level if you don't need it.
Also every hdd I've pulled from dvr receivers have been the video surveillance type. Firmware optimized for video writes. My 'ancient' 6 GB/s sata bus doesn't approach those benchmarks using video drives.
Also as mentioned in other posts here. They have the PUIS, or Power up in standby, bit set.
Good idea. Surprising when you slap them in a pc and wonder why they are identified but that's about it.
A quick run through HDAT2 to flip the bit and they spin up. I never did find a Windows utility to make them spin up or down in the os.
But definitely one reason they can last so long.
Me personally. If I were to add an external usb HDD. I'd do a bit of thinking and surfing and find an enclosure and a video drive to slap in it. And find out if PUIS could be used on the usb bus.
Nothing to do at all with running out of storage and transfer speeds.

 

[Almighty1]

I'm sure the dishies can provide better info. but as far as I know and have seen from the many curbed dvr's I've grabbed and were given. To harvest the hdd's. None will enable you to view the content on anything but the subscriber box they were recorded with. Worse yet, if your sub runs out or you get a new receiver. You're sol.

You had to mention laptop keyboards, dang you. If you're lucky yours unclips with a few tabs and a ribbon cable and put a new one in and you're golden. Or not. Usually you see heat or sonic riveted pins that hold a keyboard to the frame. On a lucky day you get a replacement with a bag of self tapping screws and spend quite a bit of time severing the pins and running screws in. On a worse day, a hot air station and gently prying the old kb frame out. Carefully preserving the pins. And for me. A heat controlled soldering station with an old soldering tip with a drilled dimple to melt the pins down over the new keyboard assy.
Or blaze out to the office supply, wally world, and grab a wired or BT kb/mouse combo. With multi device switches. It's a whole new world using one with a Fire streamer.

For my FTA receiver I use a WD Passport 1tb drive. I'd say that if you had the option to turn on or off native encryption. Turn it off. There's already enough going on in the receiver to keep you from ever viewing recorded shows on anything else.
I'm guessing a dude in your shoes has a few options. Run a drive until you get no more storage space available and back off, swap to another one. Or invest in a hdmi splitter/capture/hdcp stripper device and intercept the stuff and sent to a NAS live. That would take a lot of time.
The % verbosity and user feedback. Guessing it is what it is. In a fill-it-up and buy more kind of a way. A stripped down flavor of Linux with no user shell available.

Have to be in agreement with the viewing of the content unless someone somehow discovered a method to do it.

As for the laptop keyboard, there is really only three parts, the key itself which has two retaining clips and two inserts that goes into the hinge and then there is the rubber cup in the middle which is what sends the signals to the computer. It's the two retaining clips that are completely gone so I am deciding on who to buy the new replacement key from as the keyboard is a pain to replace since it's all the way on the bottom after opening it up from looking at the service manual and then videos. There are also many versions of the keyboard and the hinge for each one is different so the chances of me getting one with the same hinge as mines where the clips are at the same place is slim as they will all have the same part number for all the versions since the part number is more for a entire keyboard that will connect and fit to the existing machine. I mean I just need a new key which will take some time to arrive but in the meantime, a piece of tape on only one side of the key on top allows it to work correctly, both sides taped didn't work because it would hold the entire key in after you tap it while one side would allow the other side to bounce back to a level higher than the other keys as it's more to prevent the key from popping out after pressing it. The external option is good too but should only be used when no other options are available since I do have a 3840x2160 Ultra 4K display and I use the top of the box for the table so there is no room in front or back and obviously, can't physically be far from it or I will not be able to read the text on the screen.

I don't think one can turn on or off the native encryption unless there was some software tool that one can attach the WD Passport to on the computer that allows changing the configuration. It might exist since I remember even for internal drives, they have things to turn off energy management among other things, forgot which brand it was though as this was atleast 15 years ago. As for the receiver, I actually move things on the receiver daily to the EHDD so the receiver has space to record and view both the EHDD and the internal HDD on the receiver daily as everything I move to the EHDD is moved for a reason, it's because I will get to it later and the EHDD also will have 3-4 copies of the same daily episode recorded at different times of the day, the same applies to the internal HDD and the way it works is I will view one copy of it and when finished, all copies of that episode get deleted, the reason I keep all the many copies is because until I view it, some copies could have problems like the channel had a outage or some other issue with the content which might not exist in the other copies as it does happen randomly. It beats having to find the episode which may or may not happen as most of the content I watch is Hong Kong drama and some of them are both current while the others can be things originally aired anytime up to 70+ years ago. Obviously, the current as in the last 10 years is easy to find within minutes but the others just to find that one episode either I will find it or not and if I don't, can't even watch the episodes after it as every drama will have 20-60 episodes or more and its almost like if you had a book that was a million pages but split into smaller sections, if one section is missing, then you will not know what happened. Yes, the other method you mentioned is obviously going to take a lot of time. Also, there are times when the same title is presented again at a later date so I always keep a database of what title I watched and then axe the previously recorded versions on the internal HDD and any EHDD's since I already watched it so the other EHDD's may have free space. So some of the stuff on the EHDD is going to get watched and then deleted shortly as basically the one I watch daily is one show on one channel and the ones on the EHDD are all on a second channel which is not for archiving but similar to a buffer, so I can delay in watching it but there is two scheduled titles that may have 150 recordings but the title will only call it classic movie because the guide and even the one from the channel does not tell you what show it is, you need to watch it to know what show it is which shows up twice daily. I am not recording the 150 to watch in it's entirety as each one is 2 hours and 30 minutes each, I will only view the first 18 minutes of each one as they will have some small recordings of news archive, history, or even music videos of a song before the classic movie which might be of interest and then the classic show, the later I will only look at the title and who are the cast so basically it will be deleted after watching the first 18 minutes. Ofcourse after I catch up with all the episodes on the title on the first channel, I will be current. At that time, I will continue and watch based on the last date of where I left off on the 2nd channel and move to the next title after the title is finished. Not all content is new as there will be times where the same content is shown again so when that happens, I will either watch it if I haven't before or if I did, the recording gets axed each day after I watch the first 18 minutes for the same reason as the classic movies but in this case, I won't even make it as far as the cast but within the first few seconds as the song for the show would be familiar but I only do that for another reason, the guide or title might not be correct for the show as there are lots of times that the guide still shows the name of the title that already ended days or weeks ago and is already on a different title. In this case, the channels schedule on the website which is available since the previous month is correct as it shows what date a new title is showing during that time with the name of the new title but on the DISH end, the title of the recording comes from what is on the DISH Guide which is wrong.

As for the Linux used in the DISH DVR, it all depends on how much Linux there is since there are some products out there that are TV boxes that used Linux and stripped down which I think is called a board supoort package so even the apps is non standard, then you have Android which is still a flavor of Linux. Linux unlike other OSes is not really a OS as the only part that is called Linux is really the kernel, the other stuff is packaged by different vendors so while they are all called Linux, the package product is Linux for the kernel and then the other parts are package by someone else. With FreeBSD, the kernel as well as the rest of the system only comes from one source so no matter where or how you get it, it's the same product. I guess each has it's advantages, as the Linux way, people can package things in the combination they want while with the later, if there are problems, you will have to wait for that one vendor to fix or not.

 

[Almighty1]

I lived and breathed disk drives for almost 10 years at NetApp and my team did all the software support for self-encrypting drives (SEDs). I can say from all the performance testing we did, that there is no penalty for encryption. First, it's done with hardware, not software. Secondly, what limits the speed at which you can read or write data is how fast the read/write head on the end of the arm can access the required sectors on the spinning disk platters, which is always slower than the SATA interface speed including encryption if that is being done.

From what I can tell, Dish encrypts the video content before it gets written to disk and uses your account information in that encryption process. That's why if you change accounts, everything you previously recorded is lost.

Actually the answer is it may or it may not as it might depend on the implementation and if the hardware they chose can handle it or not. There is no penalty for encryption only if the SED itself had hardware that can handle it but there can also be companies that uses hardware that in the specs would handle it but when used, it would be throttling either because the hardware can't handle it or the software was poorly written. As with the DISH Hopper 3, we do know how efficient the encryption is even if it was hardware, it still needs to go through software processing. It's similar to the Hopper+ which while may have excellent specs as in CPU, but as many have seen, it has latency issues when it deals with watching satellite tv when it's nothing more than a AndroidTV addon to the Hopper 3 via a USB 2.0 cable. As for speed limitations, that goes back to the sustained speeds of the device in question and not the maximum speeds of the interface because even sustained speeds, it will have a maximum but it will never perform at the maximum sustained speeds all the time, it will still fluctuate which one will see when they try to clone between two drives as a example. As for the DISH encryption, that may or may not be correct as what they can also do is they can have the encryption that references another database for the account information as a good example of this is there is a messaging app called LINE. On Android, even on a rooted phone, you can't just backup in titanium backup and restore even on the same phone unless the Android Device ID is identical which will change each time you reset the device so what happens when you restore, LINE will delete the existing data and should you have a computer that is attached to that account, it will also remotely delete the data on the computer and log you out as well which will be in real-time if you are still logged in or when you try to login at a later date/time.
The workaround was to use a SQL editor to edit the database files but when you look at the chat history, there might be a few photos in the chat missing which does happen. The real fix without any issues is to change the Android Device ID to the same as the original device the backups came from. The Android Device ID on Android 7 and earlier was just one for the entire device. In Android 8 and newer, each app will have it's own Android Device ID so you will need to know the Android Device ID for each app and then change it so each app will have the Android Device ID it wants. So it's hard to know how it's done since I am sure if someone was really interested in doing it, they would find a way to reverse engineer it so you can watch what you previously recorded on a different account or even no account at all and ofcourse if connected to the computer but ofcourse this requires someone with the skills to reverse engineer it which might not even be now but it could be many years later when no one is even using it anymore as seen in the answer in this post when someone asked if there was a way to watch the DISH EHDD content on a computer:

So it's hard to say since there could be someone who has already done it but benefitting themselves without saying anything or someone may do it in the future if that someone has the skills or it may never happen.

When Adobe Flash was still being used, I was the one who provided the hack to Adobe Flash Player on Android that allowed people to use Adobe Flash Player on sites like Hulu which required Adobe Flash Player on a desktop before it worked.

As for 2.5" HDDs, I noticed the ones in computers which I have been using since the mid-1990s would either fail weeks or maybe 2-3 years later probably because they were internal in a computer while the 3.5" drives usually lasts a long time as I have one currently that is atleast 18 years and still running. External 2.5" drives like the 2TB seems to be more reliable but probably because engineering might have improved as the former were when it was the largest and fastest capacity at that point in time like 14GB, 20GB, 60GB and I think 100GB from IBM, Seagate, Fujitsu. Newer drives like 500GB Western Digitals also have not failed even after years. Samsung 2TB 2.5" 850 Pro which are SSDs, they do develop bad sectors after a year or two.

There are lots of things I do out of interest without being paid or even told to do but more for being curious as while I own and run a ISP with others, I would be lucky to see a penny from it but I still help customers or former customers who became enemies with my other business partners for free. This is in addition to being a NASA Astrophysicist where while I am not in the computer and networking department, I was one of the leads when they built the gigabit network connecting NASA to educational, medical organizations as well as national research labs in the mid-1990s that were all located in the greater San Francisco Bay Area.

 

[arlo]

Firstly I remember one Monday morning when Maricella came into work with her brand new Dell lappy under her arm.
I was the 'geek' so she comes up to me and says "You know what you get with a 3 year old and a butter knife"?
Reaches in her purse and pulls out a zip lock full of Chiclets. Oops...keys and springs from it.
Holeeee crap! I'm thinking. And she opens the clamshell to reveal the carnage.
Yeah. You know me. Never turn down a challenge. It took me freakin' hours. Hours, I tell ya'. At home that evening before I quit to finish the next evening. Haha. What a trip! Success. It helped she won the weekly tight jeans on chicks award.
Key caps and springs are out there. Just make sure you get detailed photo and make 100% sure there aren't any broken clips on the keyboard.

Secondly. I tried to keep up with a translated speech at the UN from that lavarov guy. The translator was speaking as fast as she could and after the puppet was done moving his puppet lips, she kept on a talking. Finishing the translation like an out-of-sync movie.. Dang. I had to insert my own line breaks on that last one, dude.

I'd have to say. If somebody figured a way to watch those recorded movies and shows on another device. They would have. And if so, info on how they do is buried so deep in the pits of darkness. Fuhgeddaboutit, yo' !
If anyone here has tried to deal with Broadcom. And got anywhere. And remembers the steps they had to do to achieve the goal. An entire day of root canal would a day at the beach!.

I would still be of the belief that a live backup to a pc with an HDMI capture card would be the only way to bring your entire hdd content to another subbed box, or to play them at your leisure on the device of your choice.
Oh. Mista' Kotta! Cipher me this please. IF you rent a movie. A) Are you allowed to record it also? And B) If you were able to record it, once the rental period expired is it still there on the hdd but you cannot watch it?

Guessing. After a bit of googlin'. That after finding out hardware drive encryption actually does give 0 overhead for the user experience. What happens when you try to clone one for backup purposes or when a failure is imminent?
That, no conclusive answers. Then again. If you're going to record video, use a video tailored storage device.
I was a believer of Seagate drives for years. Then one after another failed. Old one. Not so old ones. Just out of warranty ones. Salvaged boards from eBay to give 'er a go. Last straw was when my portable usb drive went south. Ended up stuffing it in a baggie in the freezer and grabbing chunks of my stuff before it got hot and quit working. Over and over again. Got a lot of it retrieved. After a bit of data recovery sw for the rest, at least had chopped off bits of my photos.
I'm 100% WD now. Didn't used to be.

Funny. 2.5" hdd's were used forever in laptops. And lasted pretty good. But external usb drives crap out pretty fast.
Still not a believer in the huge storage of the remaining hdd's out there these day. Unless you back them up quite frequently. Because that day will come when you start hearing the good old 'clickerdy-click-click'.
120, 250, 500GB was bad enough to have nuke on you. Yeah. And really. What family guy backs up, right?
kirkout...

 

[Almighty1]

Yeah, I already know about the clips and examined everything so it's only the key that's bad and it may have actually been bad. Sorry about the other reading issue as this forum, the cursor can jump up the message I am typing to reposition itself so I could be typing something and then half of what I typed ended up where the cursor jumped up to since it can't jump down as it would already be at the end of the message to begin with.

As for someone figuring out how to watch the movies on another device, it depends since how many people do you know here that are on xda-developers? So first the DISH product has to be something the people have a interest in reverse engineering and I don't mean the people on these forums but the ones who usually break security. No different that you have not seen someone root or bootlocker unlock the Hopper Plus AndroidTV add on box yet either since neither item are considered target devices they have an interest in. Ofcourse if the Dish DVR was used by people worldwide with massive amounts of users, then that's a different story. A good example is I have Windows 11 and I am on the Beta Insiders Channel and I am sure everyone knows there is Windows for Android Subsystem where the official version only allows Amazon app store. Well, the one on my computer which I have to manually update on the Windows for Linux subsystem before installing on the Windows side has Google Play Store, and also Magisk rooted and I have had that for since 2+ years, kernelsu is also an option. The reason is because developers have a high interest in breaking the security on it so they can install their own apps by sideloading which is not possible with the official version using Microsoft store. No different than how people reverse engineer software, it all depends on the number of people who will benefit from it since remember it's a hobby and it's not like they will get paid for it and the other thing is they need to actually have access the the product in question so someone in Russia for example is not going to have a DISH Hopper 3 DVR and also a EHDD that is actually activated so they can see what happens when they try different things and see the differences in results when they try different things.

As for Broadcom, my experience has always been that Broadcom is just widely used but their stuff is extremely buggy compared to Atheros, the later which came from Stanford University people and later got bought by Qualcomm since who has the better modems. Yes, Broadcom might be better than Intel's Puma series CPUs used in Cable Modems as everyone keeps a 500 ft pole distance from buying any Intel Puma based cable modem.

As for what you said about HDMI, in theory it may work but until one has tried it, I can't say for certain one way or another if it will work or not as remember there is HDMI and then there is HDCP which is where the barrier is as it's not from personal experience as remember the HDMI capture card may be one thing but whether or not the DISH DVR's will allow sending the audio/video to the capture card is the other issue as I am sure there has to be people on this forum who actually has a HDMI capture card on a computer who would have done that if it was possible. Then there is always another theory where someone who can mount an HDD from a DISH DVR to the computer and then write some program that will take each original file which is a recording and spit out an MPEG-4 video file and then that video file can either be played back on the computer, streamed or even copied to portable media like a USB Flash Drive or even burned to permanent media like a BluRay Disc for example.

So I don't even know what happens when one rents a movie as I had never rent a movie even when they gave me free movie rentals either on DISH (November 7, 2012-current) , Directv (May 12, 2009 to November 7, 2012) or cable (from July 9, 1984 - June 1, 2009) so I have no idea if you can even record it as maybe someone else here knows and can provide a better answer.

As for Seagate Drives, you do know each line of Seagate drives can be good or bad depending on where the technology originally came from. The Cheetah, Elite, Barracuda, WREN series just to name a few are not originally Seagate products but came from Seagate buying the Control Data/Imprimis which are considered high-end products. The other product lines from Seagate are usually junk as they can be original Seagate, what was Conner Peripherals, Samsung, MiniScribe and Maxtor, forgot if it was Seagate who bought them or not. Even Maxtor has two different product lines. Maxtor for SCSI is from Maxtor San Jose which is considered high quality. Maxtor when making EIDE/ATA/Fast ATA is considered junk and low quality as those are known as Maxtor Colorado which I believe was known as MiniScribe before it was bought by Maxtor. IBM invented most of the HDD's and was the dominant player in the 2.5" space before other brands started making 2.5" drives. The 2.5" Seagates were the Momentus line and who knows if this is Seagate technology as their quality stuff is only those based on the CDC/Imprimis products. And ofcourse ST in the model numbers originally stood for Shugart Technology which was their original name. Momentus was also the product line that later introduced 500GB Hybrid SSD 2.5" 5400rpm drives which I still have two of in it's retail packaging container but never used. It's just like Cisco is known for routers and switches but the only ones you should buy is the ones that were actually made by Cisco and not the companies they bought and then changed the name of the product to Cisco as there is a big difference. Juniper Networks is superior to Cisco any day of the week as it is also FreeBSD based just like Nokia's firewall.

I have killed drives in ways you may have never heard of. Norton SystemWorks for Windows v9.0 killed a SCSI drive after it did the defragmenting. It was probably a issue with Norton SystemWorks as after that, they called it Norton SystemWorks for Windows v1.0. As I mentioned, I had a Seagate 2GB Barracuda 7200RPM SCSI drive which I kept on the floor upside down so the circuit board was facing, I drop a piece of dust on the circuit board which smoked for 1/2 second, the drive while the leds was on, it never worked again probably because it burned the circuit or some other component on the board itself. But the good thing were both drives did not have data on it and all I had to do was called the HD manufacturer who shipped me a new replacement drive in advanced. Those were all 3.5" drives in the 1990s. In the 1980s, 20MB and 40MB hard drives that were MFM and RLL from Seagate and MiniScribe were what everyone was using. ESDI and SCSI were considered the higher end stuff. HP, DEC, Storage Dimensions which is the same company as Maxtor San Jose, Control Data Corporation(CDC)/Imprimis, Micropolis were all also considered high-end brands. WD drives used to be more reliable but slower than the other brands like Quantum and even WD can be good or bad as I have also had WD 3.5" drives that failed before. The more recent the drive regardless who it is from, the less reliable it is because remember how much it used to cost for storage and it's like almost free now, so don't have high expectations it is going to last forever. I knew a friend based on trying to get data recovered from that 14.1GB 2.5" hard drive in I believe 1997 or 1998 that lives on doing data recovery and he told me every brand can fail and I wouldn't be surprised since all the current drives are made in Thailand or China for example. If it was made in Singapore, then I would trust it as those are reliable but the cheaper the storage goes, the lower the quality control goes. IBM now known as Hitachi usually has the newest technologies but they are also the only one who has load cycles before failing in the spec sheet so for example, don't expect a IBM/Hitachi drive to last more than 100,000 cycles if I remember correctly where the head is start and stopped which doesn't exist for other brands. The MTBF can't be trusted either as that's only a assumed average, some will last longer and some will last shorter and obviously no storage manufacturer is going to test each drive for that many hours, it's only simulated.

Well, the 2.5" drives may have been used forever in laptops but the difference is other people usually buy them after that model of HDD had been used for a longer period of time so they are more reliable. When I bought the 14.1GB IBM TravelStar which came in the most expensive IBM ThinkPad 770Z 9549-8AU in 1997 or 1998, 99% of the world were using smaller capacity and drives that had been out for maybe years already so they don't have the problem. My machine completely died maybe a month later so the MB was switched and then the HDD died as well, meaning it stopped working all of a sudden with no warning. IBM/Hitachi with the 60GB 2.5" 7200RPM drives in the mid 2000's I think also had it's own issues, I have three identical Dell Insprion 8200 laptops and 2 of them ran Windows XP. The one running FreeBSD had 2 identical drives in it and as you can't hardware RAID, it was software raid as the 2nd drive always mirrored the first
one. The primary drive in the FreeBSD machine did eventually start having bad sectors as well. Fujitsu was supposed to be reliable because they ran at 5400RPM but still had problems. Fujitsu was the only other brand who made 2.5" drives. Western Digital and Seagate did not make 2.5" drives until either early to mid-2000's and ofcourse the Seagate 2.5" drives died as well, they were also 5400RPM. Western Digital 2.5" 7200RPM might only not have died because I replaced them with the pair of Samsung 2.5" 2TB SSD's. Western Digital sometime in the last 10 years also had a time where their HDD's had high failure rates that lots of people avoid the brand even now.

As for backups, as I run a ISP. There used to be a time that I backed up my own personal website as well as other things but everytime I backed up, something bad would happen to the backup and when I don't back up, I seem to not have problems so I gave up on keeping a webpage and backing up and I haven't actually not had a failure yet in the last 11 years which is actually a record. Ofcourse one day when I have the time, among other things, I might do periodic images rather with Macrium Reflect using one of the enterprise versions of the software but really don't have the time now to do it as things are piling up including the DISH DVR recording faster than I can handle as I am literally 5-6 years behind in some of the recordings and 13 years behind in emails but my money on the other hand is also coming faster than most people passively as that is also generating a low 6 digits daily in long term investments, ofcourse there are days it will go the opposite direction but that's nothing as the recovery part is fast when that happens. Wished I was a family guy as being 7 squared or almost half a century old, still single and taking care of a 95 year old mom who lives with me and is the other person who watches the same DVR recordings with me as her being illiterate in any language requires me to do the select the video, do the playback and even change the channels as I have a pretty complicated system since lots of things are not directly connected which only I know how to operate as I have a Directv HD Receiver for example and the service was disconnected since November 7, 2012 but the DVR still works fine but i is not directly connected to the TV as first it connects to a HDMI switch where the output of the HDMI switch goes to my Oppo BDP-105D BluRay Disc Player and from there, you still have to select the source as HDMI before it can be played back on the TV which you would also need to select as Blu-Ray Player on the TV itself. And don't think about tracing the wires either as it looks like a rats nest as my friend would call it.